literally

i am a writer, writer of fictions
i am the heart that you call home...
 - "the engine driver," the decemberists

i have worked with language as long as i've known how to put my dreams on paper. i've written regularly for basically the last 25 years of my life. fiction, nonfiction, poetry, prose, and even an ill-fated screenplay - your humble blog proprietor has written it all. not to brag, but i think i've got a pretty decent command of this mother tongue of mine. i hone my craft here, there and everywhere, digital and analog, recreationally and professionally. this craft bleeds into my life. i speak as i write, much to the chagrin of my legal writing professors. ("would you actually say that word?" uh, yeah, dumb-ass; that's why i wrote it.) i use metaphor, simile, exaggeration, understatement. i am an architect of words, and it's a talent a) of which i am justifiably proud and b) that has been appreciated by many people with whom i've interacted over time.

so imagine my surprise when it came to my attention that this talent is radically underappreciated by some of the people i love most dearly. i mean, it's not an outright hostility - no one's telling me, as if anyone ever could, to stop my writing. but that sort of foolishness would almost be easier to wrap my head around. it's more of an intellectual blind spot. it's almost as if this crew is thoroughly incapable of comprehending figurative language. it's the weirdest damn thing i've ever seen in my life.

there is a cold, logical literalism at work in these conversations, one that confounds and amuses me in equal parts. words must be chosen carefully in order to get a point across. well, more specifically, to avoid a five-minute excursus as to what i meant and didn't mean, what i said and didn't say. it's important in this crew to be precise. accurate, even. to say that this is a frustrating development in my life is an - ha, ha - understatement. it's funny, too, in that, in the immortal words of jimmy buffett, if i couldn't laugh, i would just go insane.

look, i'm a lawyer. i understand the need to be incredibly precise. but guess what? my linguistic crayon box has 120 colors in it, and i will use every single goddamned one of them. i will not be stultified just because people in this world still use the 8-crayon kindergarten pack. i am a master of the language, spoken and written, and i will practice my art and craft, loud and proud. and if you can't hang? well. i'd advise that you either learn to drive or get off the track, or else you're liable to get left behind...

heavy cloud, no rain

i haven't seen the sun since this weekend. whenever i've been out among the living, it's been heavily gray and dismal outside. that's been nice for the temperature; for those of us who walk everywhere we go, it's a welcome change from hot and humid. however, it's also an accurate reflection of my mood, and the cloud gets heavier as the days go by.

part of my come-to-jesus moment with the man sunday night involved the fact that i don't like to entangle the past with the present. i would much rather concentrate on moving forward. it's irritating to me that i'm as upset as i am over all of this, and it's infuriating that i can't keep a lid on it in his company. he doesn't deserve to have to pick up the pieces from someone else's destruction. but he insisted that i allow myself to feel whatever it is i'm feeling, whether or not he's there.

so i'm feeling it. and it's pretty damned rotten. as happy as i can be in the moment, and there's a lot to be happy about, my general head state is full of anger, sadness and fear. compound that with a double-barreled dose of just horrific circumstances in the lives of people i know, and that's a recipe for not wanting to leave my bed. but i do. i go out into the world and pretend like i'm 100% okay, laughing and joking with my friends. then the night ends, i come in and i close the door. that's when i drop the pretense, open the floodgates and just let it all come out.

relatively speaking, anyway. for the last two years, i've spent so much time acting like nothing was wrong that i think i've forgotten how to express emotion in any real way. i said in the moment that all i wanted to do was develop the ability not to give a damn. i did, but i think i've overachieved. when i admit to myself how upset i am, all i can do is conjure up this generically dull ache. it kills my focus, magnifies any physical pain and knocks me flat on my back. i am unable to do anything more than stare at the computer screen or the TV, taking in whatever is in front of me with no analysis or thought of any kind. i feel, but i can't process.

this kills me. it makes me want to do something - ANYTHING - to work out the pain. i thought i was past this sort of reaction. like every thinking person, i've had my bouts with depression, with serious mental issues. i feel myself creeping towards that place again. over my dead body will i let that happen again. so i'll put on my helmet in the morning, go back out there and show the world how strong i am. and i'll do my damnedest to find a good way to process this. it won't beat me. i won't let it.

clouds eventually blow away.

gunner

i'm a veteran at this whole law-school thing. hell, i have a law degree and everything. you'd think that one more year of this would be painless and smooth. i mean, i'm in my element; i am studying my favorite subject matter, the one to which i am dedicating my professional life. i am at a world-class school, and i have every opportunity to be everything i want to be. but something's been just a little... off about this whole experience. we're four weeks in, and inside my program, i feel totally at ease and comfortable. tonight, it finally hit me exactly what the problem is in my new home.

it's that it's not really a "home." everyone's perfectly nice in the general population; no one's been outwardly cruel or horrible to me. but these kids are not interested in being a community. this is one of those schools where every person there, especially in the non-LL.M. crowd, is 100% out for himself or herself, and frankly, you're kind of in their way. this is such a misguided approach to law school, to the practice, and to life in general. good lord. i mean, it's not surprising, i guess. it's a whole school full of hardcore overachievers, people who have reached for the best all their lives. why stop now? it's gotten them everything they've ever wanted.

except it doesn't have to be that way. look, i'm a recovering overachiever myself. and i've spent a lot of time lamenting the time in my life when i settled. but there's a definite - and vitally important - difference between striving healthily for the best you can get and what these kids are doing. devoting yourself to the cold, ruthless pursuit of the next brass ring on your list, damn the torpedoes, is by far not the only way to get what you want. take it from me; above average effort nets you almost as much as bare-knuckles overwork, and it makes you a LOT happier.

so i look around at the overcompetitive, hyper-"friendly" gunner kids at my school with a combination of confusion and pity. it makes me sad for them, but it makes me feel that much better about my strategy for life. i may not be the valedictorian of my class. but i'll give this program my best. that means my best in academics, in culture, and in the bare recognition that i'm not the only person on the planet, in the city, in the school or in the hall. we all earned our way here. why not be friends?

upgrade

i went to my new school for the first time today. it was kinda fun, in that nervous-unsure way starting something new always is. i picked up my ID card, went to an interview and used the library for the first time. let me tell you, i have definitely hit the majors. i imagine this is what guys feel like when they leave scranton/wilkes-barre and show up at yankee stadium: there's a palpable sense of BIG LEAGUES when you walk through the door.

i love learning. it's why i went into an intellectual discipline for my career. and though i loved the hell out of my law-school experience, it's supremely exciting to be set loose in this marble playground for the next year. i'm bound and determined to soak up every single drop that i can while it's my sole job to learn tax law in this legal-education paradise. it's a new feeling to me to have the best in life laid at my feet. i'm a teacher's kid. i went to public school in the deep south. i graduated from a state university for undergrad and law school. but this? oh, man. this is a cathedral of legal learning. the doors this will open for me should be pretty nice ones. i should be able to reach a much higher level than i would otherwise have been able to reach. i am grateful as hell, and i'm going to make the most of this.

it's a big damn deal. i'm open to this. let's go get it.

aspirations

so i think it's time to take this little enterprise next level. what little enterprise? everything in my life. i have got to start striving a little harder, all the way around. i was always so freaking happy as a kid when i had goals, something to work towards. i mean, i was a wicked procrastinator, and a touch of an underachiever in a couple of areas (calculus, i'm looking at you). but work has always given me my grounding, made me happy, and helped me define who i am. well, except for that little patch of wandering in the wilderness there in the middle. between undergrad and law school, i just... coasted, i guess, is the best word for it. and that was MISERABLE. god, the more i look back on it, the more i realize that every day i just did whatever was bare-minimum necessary, with no aim other than a) earn paycheck and b) spend paycheck, i was killing the parts of me that made me who i am. not acceptable AT ALL.

so here i sit, having just logged about a 12-hour day reviewing for the bar exam (gaah, less than two months), and you'd think that would be misery. nope; i am pretty freaking satisfied, all things considered. i am on my way to building my life as it should've been built all along. i am through wasting time. i am trying, i am working, and i am achieving. work may sound like a weird way to define yourself; i know we're all supposed to be about our emotional connections, etc., etc., etc. "i don't let my job define me!" well, yeah, you don't let your employer define you. but you damn well better have something to define yourself with, and in my case, it's my legal life. i am going to be the best damn tax lawyer i can possibly be. i will define myself by my profession, my achievements and my resume. i'm done drifting. it's time to get back to what made me: being just remarkably good at what i do. arrogant? maybe. but i can back it up. let's do the damn thing, starting today.

destruction [TRUE STORY]

so as i sit here today, there's a giant pile of oil threatening the state i'm about to leave. my god, it's going to be the most brutal ecological disaster we've seen in a generation, if not worse. the beaches i've spent my life on are about to get besmirched beyond recognition. the wetlands that defend this state from hurricanes are about to get wiped out for perhaps a generation. the people who run the national oceanic and atmospheric administration are SCARED. there goes tourism, fishing, the two or three things these folks have left.

i don't know how to articulate my rage. we've been irresponsible for a long time about energy. ah, the insouciance of the american public when it comes to something that's not an immediate crisis. "eh, no big deal. we've got time to figure this out. hey, check out my new yukon denali SUV - it holds thirty-seven people AND their hockey gear!" well, guess what. time's up. miners are dying. oil slicks are about to destroy a large portion of the south. WAKE. UP. sweet lord, something has to be done. and you know what, people out there in the teabagger toddler-ocracy that is the american electorate? IT'S GOING TO SUCK.

things will not be freewheeling and fun the way that the supply-siders told you it would thirty years ago. what we need to do as a country (and by god, this goes for ALL areas of policy, not just this) is to figure out a long-term plan to a) figure out what's wrong, b) prioritize the problems, and c) go about SOLVING THEM. politics is not supposed to be glib, sound-bite friendly, or entertaining. it's supposed to be hard. it's supposed to be smart. it's supposed to take time. if we don't stop electing idiots to office, and i call 'em like i see 'em, we're never gonna get there. you'll end up with stupid, short-sided laws like the arizona "stop all the brown people" rule, that don't SOLVE ANYTHING.

maybe it's me. i am an educated, thoughtful person. (only child much?) but i have one expectation: THINK. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, THINK. what's about to happen to my gulf coast is only the tip of the iceberg if we don't start thinking.

crunch time

and so it begins. after nearly three years of struggle, tumult, crisis and triumph, law school is just about over. today, my head goes down and i start the work of exam prep. i also start a thirty-day yoga regimen; one class every single day, without fail. it's funny to think this way on the christian easter sunday. everyone else ends their period of work and reflection today with a celebration, an indulgence, and a rebirth. i, however, go underground for this time every year. this year, i really want to dazzle everyone with the results of the next month. i've got a LOT riding on the outcome. i've got so much to look forward to, and i really need to make sure i'm in the proper frame of mind (and in the right physical shape) to embrace the future properly. the goal of exam time, which is actually really nice, is to tamp down all the stress and drama of my emotional life to live exclusively in the intellectual realm for awhile. i think that's why i like exam period so much. either that, or i'm insane.

so hopefully it doesn't get too boring around here over the next month. i'll do my best to make outlining and down-dog sound fun. :)

god

[in all seriousness, if you've got faith in a higher power and don't like it when people don't, i'd tread lightly here if i were you. i'm going to say things that will make you unhappy.]

many people are raised into religion. i wasn't really. i mean, i was baptized into the presbyterian faith, but it never really took, i guess. in fact, one of the many ways i tried to shoehorn myself into whatever image i thought would suit my relationship was to pretend to be a serious christian. i mean, i allowed myself to be married in a christian ceremony when i knew full good and well how little i believed in the words i was saying.

when i lost my mother, i cursed the very nature of her life on this earth. i mean, what kind of existence did she have? she was wracked by debilitating mental illness for her ENTIRE LIFE. nothing eased it, and the only relief she ever had from the static in her head came from chemicals. what kind of just and loving god would allow that? foolishness. there's no such thing as noble, redemptive suffering. i've been on that rant before. but seriously, if there's a god who would allow that kind of pain to happen and sit back and do nothing, especially if he's supposedly so all-fired concerned with every last little detail of how we live, then i want no part of that death-cult, thanks.

so i guess you could call me an enemy of religion. i don't pretend to know what the afterlife holds. that's kind of my point: i am just not arrogant enough to presume that some book of fairy stories written hundreds of years after the events were supposed to have happened is the straight-up script to success after death. nope. but even feeling that way, i used to have a live-and-let-live attitude about religion. none for me, thanks, but do what you want to do (as long as you leave me alone about it). however, in light of recent events in my life, i've moved from a detente position about living your life by some god's supposed will to an all-out war. and no, i will not be nice anymore.

my family is chocked to the gills with deep believers in a charismatic form of christianity. who knows how this happened? not me. but sure enough, they're all reeeeeeally into the whole jesus thing. my little cousins were raised on it, and somehow most of them got out OK, except for one. this girl has been tested since birth. she was born with serious health problems. by the time she was 5, she'd had surgeries that numbered in the double digits. and instead of being normal about it and treating her like a real kid, my family decided to carry her around on a little satin pillow and tell her how fragile she is. how special she is. give her all manner of special treatment, often to the detriment of her own siblings and cousins. it was abundantly clear who the favorite was in our family.

but the worst thing they did to her was the two-pronged attack on any chance she had to be a deep thinker: they filled her head with jesus, and they told her she was going to die. therefore, what we got was a kid with no direction, no intellect, and no drive. oh yeah - and since she was so steeped in christian mysticism, to put it kindly, she had no faith (ha ha) in what her doctors said, especially the part about "hey, you'd better never get pregnant, because you, the kid or both could die."

i think you know what happened next. the girl turned up pregnant by her affable-but-worthless fiance. the doctors told her, "hey, now that you disobeyed us and got pregnant, you need to end this pregnancy. it's almost a given that you, the kid or both could die." her own FATHER told her to do it. but no, that's not what god would want. the "baby" (at this time, a three-week-old clump of cells with no human identity) has a heartbeat, because that's what church told her! so the girl has basically stumbled upon a novel way to commit both suicide and homicide by refusing to put aside the dangerously irrational religious toxin to SAVE HER OWN GODDAMNED LIFE.

so my cousin is most likely going to die in six months. her kid might die too. and for what? religion. the toxic mind-rot that is charismatic religion. and when this tragedy unfolds, my grandparents and my aunt will talk about god's great plan. and i will look them in the face and say, "the blood is on your hands. YOU. DID. THIS. you killed her with your insane refusal to live in this world and your addle-brained insistence on concentrating on the next. sleep well."

killer god. killer fucking god. there's no goddamned sky-daddy; there's just this cancerous poison rotting the minds of people all over the world. the opiate of the masses? hardly. opiates at least numb the nerves. religion doesn't even promise happiness, unless you count the faux-orgasmic state of mind of "gifts of the spirit." it's a mind-fuck. that's all it is. from my cousin, to the thousands lost on september 11, to every american soldier who meets a taliban IED, to every gay teenager who slits his wrists because the church told him he was damned, it's the biggest shame of human life. religion breeds death.

hold your own

i remember the first time someone hinted to me that my ambitious nature might be anything less than completely desirable. i was talking to the mother of an old boyfriend about my life and how i'd gotten where i was at that time. it was a pretty, if i do say so myself, impressive course to have charted: on my own, full-time college student, two jobs and a robust social life. i made above-average grades and pretty much did as i pleased.

"wow," this woman said to me. "you're so... independent."

her tone was so strange that it stopped me dead in my tracks. i mean, isn't that the goal of growing up - to become an actual, real, independent adult who can fend for herself? it was the first instance i'd ever encountered of how jealous, petty people will do anything they can to thwart people who can see the road and walk down it with confidence.

growing up, i prided myself on being able to hold my own without a lot of help or guidance. i've lost track of that ambition, that will to succeed, a time or two over the years. some of my choices have suffered. but a few years ago, the scales fell from my eyes, and i started to see that (despite the stumbles) i could still have the smart, tough and exciting life i'd always wanted. it was just a matter of putting my head down and going to it. so i did. i sit here now at the end of one degree, with one more to go, ready to cut ties with my repressive and limiting choices and charge forth into the future of MY OWN DETERMINATION. i follow no rules but my own. as one story winds down, this one picks up, and it's far more exciting to me to see where this one goes...

writer of fictions [TRUE STORY]

[note: when i bracket "true story" in a title, you can take every word of the post to the bank. sometimes it's fun to pull the mask off, eh?]

i've been a writer since i first learned how to form words with one of those big fat little-kid pencils. i've found "stories" that i wrote on penmanship tablet paper in 1986, largely concerned with dogs and adventures. i've never been an essayist, really; my one true artistic love has been fiction. writing stories is perhaps the only place in this world where i can sort out the static in my head, look at things i will only ever imagine, and extrapolate small impulses to their logical extremes, and sometimes beyond.

therapy, i'm sure, works for a lot of people. been there, tried that, and have SO moved on. my problem with therapy is that there's no real exploration. it's a pretty reductive process: "this happened." "what did you think/feel about it?" "i felt X." "why?" ad nauseam. that is not helpful to me. i am the kind of woman who needs to vent. i am also, despite law school's best efforts to break me of this habit, a highly imagination-driven person. i need to tear things apart, look at the reality, and take that next step into the surreality.

so you hold in your virtual hands, by and large, the internet version of a lifelong process for me. these little stories, these flights of fancy, these midsummer night's dreams all have roots in my heart, my mind and my soul. but they truly live in my imagination, the most vibrant and important part of my psyche. there's a kernel of truth in everything i say. how much of that kernel makes it to the page, however, well... let's just let that be my little secret, OK?